Mac the bus driver on the Ringling Blue Unit also had the concession to sell Ringling stationary. Naturally, he also sold postage stamps. He marked them up to twelve cents a piece so he could make a little something on the side for his old age. The gouger.
When the train was parked miles away from the arena Mac cleared a tidy profit. A one way ride was 25 cents, so everyone who did not own their own car had to pony up at least fifty cents each day. Mac made a run to the train between shows as well, and if there were some kind of big attraction in the vicinity, such as a Six Flags or discount liquor warehouse, he also made special runs. But when the train was parked right next to the arena, Mac had to hustle the Ringling stationary to make a any money for the week.
“Need some paper and envelopes, kid?” he’d ask me each day. He knew his clientele well. I often wrote three or four letters each day. To family. To friends. To girls I’d met along the way who deigned to give me their mailing address. To friendly LDS Bishops who’d had me over for Sunday dinner when I’d managed to get to church on Sunday. I loved writing to book authors. I wrote to John McCabe, William K. Everson, and Robert Lewis Taylor, care of their publishers. And actually got replies! It must have been the Ringling stationary, because my missives were greatly lacking in much charm, wit, or penmanship. I wrote them all out in longhand.
John McCabe actually invited me to start a correspondence with him about clowns and comedy. He’d written a bestselling biography about Laurel & Hardy, and so we began shooting notes to each other about the best way to do a spit take and the endless comedic possibilities of the bowler hat.
As the show traveled through the muggy Midwest that summer I was approached by one of the Bulgarian acrobats with an odd request. Stancho was built like a brick wall and made no bones about wanting to find an American lady farmer he could marry so he could stay in the country. He loved the United States. He loved American food, American beer, and American cigarettes. I never saw him without a Marlboro stuck between his lips. His head was connected directly to his shoulders, and he turned his whole body to me earnestly early one summer day to ask that I write a billet doux for him to a lady pig farmer he’d met in Ohio. Stancho had struck up a conversation with her after a matinee performance; he thought she liked him, so wanted to stake it all on a love letter to her. But since his English was almost nonexistent, and he always saw me writing letters, he thought perhaps I would do this nice thing for him.
Nothing loath to push along a bit of romance, I took down his dictation, which consisted of some inarticulate grunts, the phrase “love you much” repeated ad nauseum, and some graphic pantomime as to what he intended to do to her if and when they ever met up again. I managed to produce several decent paragraphs that reduced his pornographic ravings to a mild notification of his affection for her, and handed it over to him. He gave me a hearty slap on the shoulder, nearly dislocating a clavicle, and pronounced me ‘one good guy, by damn!’
I thought no more of the matter until two weeks later, when Stancho dragged me out of clown alley to report that his lady pig farmer had not only written him back, but made arrangements to meet him at the Sunset Motel in Bismarck, North Dakota, when the show played there, for a night of international accord. He needed to respond to her immediately with an ardent assent, and pressed me to once again be his amanuensis. I quickly scribbled a note telling her that Stancho was amenable to her diplomatic plans. This time he didn’t slap me on the back, the Slavic fool kissed me on both cheeks, fortunately removing his smoldering Marlboro before doing so.
Stancho soon had the word circulating that if you needed a hot letter for a hot lady, the skinny young whiteface with the long brown hair was your man. I was inundated with requests from tongue-tied Hungarians, Romanians, Russians, Swedes, and Poles, to compose ballads and out and out salacious propositions for their ladies fair. Sharpening my quill with gusto, I went to work with a will. It felt good to be needed in a literary way.
And did I pull a Mac the bus driver on them, charging them for my services? I did not. As the song says, I did it all for love. More fool me. For soon the requests were piling up, and the durn furriners were getting pickier and pickier about what they wanted me to say for them. A simple “I love you my darling” was not good enough anymore; they wanted Shakespeare and Cyrano de Bergerac. That’s when I discovered how thin-skinned I really am as a writer. I cradle each of my sentences like a newborn babe, and anyone who dares to criticize or threaten one of them is a monster. Who should be burned at the stake.
Besides, I was starting to get carpal tunnel syndrome from all that labored scribbling.
Too chicken to tell them all directly “Nyet,” I bought an arm sling at a Walgreens and wore it conspicuously for the next several days, pointing to it sadly and shaking my head in the negative whenever a hormone-wracked Romeo requested an epistle to their hot tomato.
I’d neglected my own correspondence during this mad period, but dasn’t be seen writing anything lest the baying horde descend upon me again. So I recorded letters on cassette tapes, using a cassette tape recorder that Holst had. Back in the 70’s everyone had a cassette player, unless you were a Hutterite.
Anchorface had noted my literary popularity, so when I retired from the field he stepped in to offer his services. The only difference being he charged five dollars per love letter. I thought they’d lynch him, but amazingly enough he built up quite a large customer base for his love notes -- which, I may say without prejudice, never came close to expressing their sentiments as tenderly as mine did. His were strictly cut rate, tin plate, Casanova.
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